Laws don't apply to US

[tw]

Every academy educated military officer I know has declared support for John Kerry due to what they perceive as total incompetance by George Jr. Active duty classmates warned that events in Iraq were going badly.

from The Economist of 23 Oct in a review of the book "Chain of Command"
If Mr Hersh is to be believed, a growing crowd of serving and retired officials despair at the blunders and the opportunities missed by Mr Bush and his closest advisers - in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the hunt for Osama bin laden and the rest of al-Qaeda, in efforts at controlling nuclear proliferation, in dealing with Saudia Arabia, Syria and Iran, and in trying to improve homeland security.

Teams of lawyers within the government, most of them political appointees, formulated new legal policies that redefined torture as limited to the pain equivalent to "major organ failure or death". They argued that in any case the president, as the commander-in-chief in the war on terror, could not be bound by international treaties or federal laws forbidding torture. When interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo yielded little in the way of intelligence, Mr Rumsfeld authorised new, harsher interrogation techniques. The general who developed these techniques was sent to Iraq, to "improve" interrogations there as well, since Iraq's insurgency was growing, and the American forces there had little knowledge of who they were fighting. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib soon become routine.

More specifically, Guantanamo human rights violations were hidden, permitted, and endorsed by the administration. Clearly, any patriotic soldier or government official would leak this to the press. Now we have two more revelations. Excerpt from Washington Post of 24 Oct:

CIA Secret Transfers of Iraqi Detainees Decried
At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation -- a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.

One intelligence official familiar with the operation said the CIA has used the March draft memo as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq in the last six months. The agency has concealed the detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities, the official said.

The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says are protected by the treaty. ...

The 1949 treaty notes that a violation of this particular provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord, and thus a "war crime" under U.S. federal law, according to a footnote in the Justice Department draft.

CIA officials have not disclosed the identities or locations of its Iraq detainees to congressional oversight committees, the Defense Department or CIA investigators who are reviewing detention policy, according to two informed U.S. government officials and a confidential e-mail on the subject shown to The Washington Post. ...

The Office of Legal Counsel also wrote the Aug. 1, 2002, memo on torture that advised the CIA and White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in the war on terrorism. President Bush's aides repudiated that memo once it became public this June. ...

For instance, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib criticized the CIA practice of maintaining "ghost detainees" -- prisoners who were not officially registered and were moved around inside the prison to hide them from Red Cross teams. Taguba called the practice "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law." ...

Gen. Paul J. Kern, who oversaw another Army inquiry, told Congress that the number of CIA ghost detainees "is in the dozens, to perhaps up to 100."

The article even cites specific requests made by senior George Jr administration officials to hide prisoners in direct violation of international law. Open violation of international law were approved at the highest levels.

Excerpt from the first in a series - NY Times of 24 Oct 2004

After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism. ...

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.

But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.

Hundreds? Hundreds of what now are probably innocent people were held for years in torture like Abu Ghraid - in violation of international law and basic American principles? This is an honest and religious president - or just another example of those who created the Spanish Inquistion?

But extensive interviews with current and former officials and a review of confidential documents reveal that the legal strategy took shape as the ambition of a small core of conservative administration officials whose political influence and bureaucratic skill gave them remarkable power in the aftermath of the attacks.

The strategy became a source of sharp conflict within the Bush administration, eventually pitting the highest-profile cabinet secretaries - including Ms. Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - against one another over issues of due process, intelligence-gathering and international law.

Violation of fundamental human rights was always known at senior levels of the George Jr admininstration - among those who tell the president what his decision will be. Specifically listed as fully informed are Cheney, Ashcroft and Pentagon general counsel William Haynes.

The administration's claim of authority to set up military commissions, as the tribunals are formally known, was guided by a desire to strengthen executive power, officials said. Its legal approach, including the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions, reflected the determination of some influential officials to halt what they viewed as the United States' reflexive submission to international law.

In devising the new system, many officials said they had Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda in mind. But in picking through the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, military investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts, officials said.

The article then notes who these lawyers were who would define outright subversion of international law and American justice principles. Most had worked previously for Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia or DC Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence H. Silberman.

Senior officials of the State Department and the National Security Council staff were excluded from final discussions of the policy, even at a time when they were meeting daily about Afghanistan with the officials who were drafting the order. According to two people involved in the process, Mr. Cheney advocated withholding the draft from Ms. Rice and Secretary Powell.

When the two cabinet members found out about the military order - upon its public release - Ms. Rice was particularly angry, several senior officials said. Spokesmen for both officials declined to comment. ...

"The military lawyers would from time to time remind the civilians that there was a Constitution that we had to pay attention to," said Admiral Guter, who, after retiring as the Navy judge advocate general, signed a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of plaintiffs in the Guantánamo Supreme Court case. ...

In early 2002, Admiral Guter said, during a weekly lunch with Mr. Haynes and the top lawyers for the military branches, he raised the issue with Mr. Haynes directly: "We need more information."

Mr. Haynes looked at him coldly. "No, you don't," he quoted Mr. Haynes as saying.

Torture and other outright violations of International Treaties are intentionally subverted, in part, because admininstration officials were determined "to halt what they viewed as the United States' reflexive submission to international law". Screw the world? Blame the French. God is on our side? What kind of leaders do we have?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Stopping terrorists and other criminals, always requires some secrecy.
BUT the very foundation of our Country and it's legal system is the transparency of it's procedures, limitations and scope. This is clearly a move away from that. I see it as a very bad move. It's a violation of everything America has stood for, fought for, bragged of and cherished.
I don't know whose worse, those that do it or those that permit it.
Extrordinary times call for extrordinary measures? Bullshit, that means the terrorists have succeeded in destroying our very foundation.......or the Bush Babies have.

[richlevy]

Current US foreign policy is based on the most fundamental law of all, the golden rule of the Western movie.

<TABLE
<TD BGCOLOR=880000
The man wearing the white hat is the good guy and everything he does is right, even the things that don't look right. </TD> </TABLE>

The more I read and hear about all these things, the more depressed I get. A people get the government they deserve. The people who vote for Bush deserve him. God help the rest of us.

[tw]

Originally Posted by richlevy

<TD BGCOLOR=880000
The man wearing the white hat is the good guy and everything he does is right, even the things that don't look right. </TD>

I believe his name was Paladin. On his business card was "Have Gun, Will Travel". The hero wore all black including a black hat. I don't even think he smiled (so I can only guess the color of his teeth). First impression - he must be evil.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by tw

I believe his name was Paladin. On his business card was "Have Gun, Will Travel". The hero wore all black including a black hat. I don't even think he smiled (so I can only guess the color of his teeth). First impression - he must be evil.

Well, sure, he was the exception that proved the rule. Anyway, the guy in white was still always the good guy, until this guy broke the rule.

I might also add that a man who has a business card which reads "Have gun, will travel" is not exactly the kind of guy you usually want to bring home for dinner. Paladin was a glorified hit man. The precurser of many, it would seem.